B-schools and business books teach you great stuff… but it's no match to what you learn in real life work experience.

A New Year, CES 2015, and world peace.

It’s been a long while since my last post. Meanwhile another year has passed by … and 2015 is off to an excellent start. A few hours to kill in transit here at the ANA suite lounge at Tokyo Haneda airport, on my way back from CES 2015, and that’s enough time to post a short update – my first for the new year.

First, I’d like to say a big thank you to all who came by our booth at CES. Thank you for the fruitful meetings.

CES doesn’t really impress any longer with ground-breaking new technologies. But every year we notice some of the tech trends solidify further with incremental innovations. My biggest takeaways from CES 2015 were:

Flat screen TVs will continue to get slimmer and larger, while High Definition screen resolutions will continue to increase into higher definitions. Content will be streamed to these devices, eliminating a lot of the clutter that we used to have around us in our living rooms.

Homes will get smarter as we continue to live our lives that get busier by the day. Companies that come into the Smart Home foray with a point-product solution offering will fail. Only those with simple yet smart ecosystems will win eventually, as this will be a game of scalability and simplicity.

We make ourselves busier and unhealthier every day, while wishing to live longer. That’s when we seek technology’s help to assist us live a healthier lifestyle. Be it the wearable pulse or heart-rate monitor, or that App which helps you jog, or plates that will measure food and calories, this is a segment where you can expect some really cool developments in the future.

Cars will get smarter and driver-less. Be it a simple auto valet parking application or a fully functional driver-less car, we are now seeing the tip of the iceberg of a new segment here.

Drones are going to be everywhere, and we will potentially be “printing” them using 3D printers. There are some cool use cases for these drones, the same as robots, but let’s wait and see. I have my own opinion about this segment.

Lastly… smartphones are evolving to such an extent that making calls will be the least used application on a smartphone in the very near future. We and our identities will be so closely linked to our smartphones that our next generation children will expect everything in this world to be ‘connected’ to each other, and to be fully controllable from their smartphones.

Be it streaming a 4K video, or controlling all those appliances in our homes, or paying for a high calorie dessert, or monitoring our stats while we jog and burn the calories from that dessert, or driving our cars, or steering our drones… all of the above trends will have some sort of convergence into a smartphone App.

So what am I going to do about all this right now?

I will sit back here at this lounge with my nice hot cup of tea, and watch the news of so many unfortunate things happening around us, especially in Paris. I hope and pray that people will stop all this nonsense and learn to live in peace in this new year.

If our eventual objective is to kill each other for whatever reasons, who are we building all these amazing technologies for? On one hand we want our homes to get smarter, while we ourselves are acting so stupid.

So let’s all live peacefully, respect each other, and value humanity. Let that be our new year resolution.